"A Court Stenographer For War Criminals"

An Arabic-speaking counterterrorism expert, SERE training expert, and a combat
veteran with twenty-eight years of operational experience in the Middle
East, Malcolm Nance, takes on the torture-defenders:

I spent twenty years in intelligence and four years in the
SERE program waterboarding people before I ever opened my mouth on the
subject. Marc Thiessen is a fool of the highest magnitude if he thinks
he knows anything about waterboarding. His claims are based not on
first-hand experience but on a classified briefing from people with an
agenda of justifying what was done. That makes Thiessen into a court
stenographer for war criminals rather than a person with any real claim
of expertise. As for his claim about the relationship between Pol
Potera waterboarding and what we have done derived from the SERE
program, he’s wrong. Before I arrived at SERE, I went to S21 prison in
Cambodia. Right next to the Wall of Skulls sits the exact waterboard
platform that the SERE program copied for our own use in the training
program. Remember, our goal was to prepare pilots for the techniques
they might face if they fell into the hands of our enemies. I was
waterboarded on arrival at SERE, and then as a senior staffer, I
performed the technique or supervised it through hundreds of evolutions.

Thiessen’s central purpose is apparently to glorify the most
extreme practices used by the CIA in the Bush era and to argue that
each of these practices, including waterboarding, is vitally necessary
to our national securityeven though no president used them before, and
it seems that President Bush himself halted many of these practices over
Cheney’s objection. We have prosecuted and convicted men for using
these techniques in the past, and we were right to do so.

This suggests to me that, while he may cite Thomas Aquinas,
Thiessen has no sense of honor and no moral compass. I give him credit
for his loyalty to the Cheneys, but he’s blind to their errors in
judgment. The use of waterboarding and other torture techniques was a
powerful recruitment tool for Al Qaeda; it spawned thousands of would-be
suicide bombers. Thiessen claims that we gained “intelligence” by using
these torture techniques. But this shows that he knows nothing about
the intelligence process or how our enemy grows and sustains itself.

Thousands of American POWs died and suffered resisting
torture practices that we have always called the tools of the enemy. The
SERE program was designed to help them grapple with this inhumanity and
retain their dignity in the face of it. Now Thiessen and his boss want
us to embrace the tactics we used in that programtaken from the
Russians, the Communist Chinese, the North Koreans, the North
Vietnamese, the Khmer Rougeas our own. He claims that these techniques
are unpleasant but have no long-term physical or mental impact. Really? I
challenge him to put up or shut up. I offer to put him through just one
hour of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized
in the Bush Administration’s OLC memosincluding the CIA-approved
variant of waterboarding. If at the end he still believes this is not
torture, I’ll respect his viewpoint. But not until then. By the way, I
can assure you that, within that hour, I’ll secure Thiessen’s written
admission that waterboarding is torture and that his book is a pack of
falsehoods. He’ll give me any statement I want in order to end the
torture.

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